At the Chapel, Bruton, is a restaurant and hotel in a former chapel in Bruton. This was once an ordinary town in Somerset, with a note in the Domesday Book, a ruined priory and a famous dovecote on a hill. Bruton is known for a flood in 1917 – it was the second-largest one-day rainfall measured in the UK – but another calamity was coming. In 2014 the art gallery Hauser & Wirth, with branches in London, Zurich and New York, decided it needed a premises in Bruton, and a restaurant called the Roth Bar and Grill. There is also an Instagram-friendly farmhouse to rent on this site. When I toured it, the price was £666 a night, including the art and, I hope, a food gift basket and, I suspect, an ancient native Briton graveyard.

It is a truism that what happened to the Cotswolds is now happening to Somerset. If Worthy Farm’s Glastonbury and its bogus monied hippies is at least partially to blame, the cows won’t admit it. This part of Somerset is tinnily fashionable, existing as much in the pages of dying magazines as in reality. There is Babington House, the country branch of Soho House, and the Newt, a sumptuous hotel. George Osborne, formerly of Austerity, is now of Bruton too, and though I wouldn’t like him for a neighbour – I once sat next to him at the ballet, and he sucked all the positive energy from the room, quite a feat in an opera house – apparently it counts.

Under all this, Bruton – the real Bruton – sags. Who could not, under the weight of all this expectation and house-price drivel? The high street is pretty and various, but there is an air of exhaustion to it, like a woman in the wrong life: poor Bruton! Fine gift shops with gaudy detritus sit next to useful shops, which wilt in comparison. It’s a paradigm of Bruton’s unwished-for destiny: or Mean Girls for shops.

There is treasure though, and I know it when I see it, because I use rural public transport. There is a train station! Beside it, I find a shop selling Somerset cheddar in the shape of a heart, because some people need to feel loved by cheese. There is also a dress shop called Swan Vintage with a resident live baby chicken called Chicky. I spend some time hugging Chicky, who is more novelistic than he knows. Chickens do not care about clothes. They have their own.

Chicky aside, At the Chapel is probably the least alienating place in Bruton (though not for Chicky). It is large, which helps (Matt’s Kitchen,a yet more fashionable local restaurant, is minute). There is a bakery at the front, a vast high room at the back, pale and galleried, and a basement below, with a well covered by glass in the floor. I distrust this, but I am obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien, and Bruton is a good a Moria as any. The well is the only oddity here, unless you count the meditation classes. The menu is unthreatening, the staff are charming, and one says that Benedict Cumberbatch once came in with his family and gave an impersonation of a completely normal person.

We eat pizza, doughy, charred and excellent; a burrata with crispy shallots and a rosemary focaccia; Isle of Wight tomatoes with honey truffle ricotta and grilled five-seed sourdough; an At the Chapel burger (at least it retains a sense of place until you swallow it) with smoked God-minster and bacon and a cider and onion jam, and a Brixham hake. If I cannot shake the sense of dining on a fragment of glossy magazine print, that is not the fault of the restaurant but the times.